An ecological disaster has the effect of “zombifying” part of the population. This is what a young financier and his daughter understand on the train that takes them to Busan, on the south coast of Korea, where the virus has not yet struck.
Intelligent, lively, combining human stakes and formal brilliance (the group attacks of zombies are impressive), this film has everything from the ideal blockbuster. One could fear that, like the train in which survivors and mutants are locked up, the plot remains wisely placed on its tracks, a little prisoner of its program. However, filmmaking always finds material to push back the limits of the genre, most often through brief, dry and chilling images (these aggressions muffled by the Plexiglas of the portholes and the speed of the train, which the heroes can barely distinguish) or through discoveries ingenious scenarios: the scene where a handful of survivors go back up the “infected” wagons is an invention model.
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To make matters worse, Sang-ho Yeon, a filmmaker who trained in animation, pulls off his political metaphor: it’s hard not to think of the division of the two Koreas, the nuclear threat from the North and the stiffening of the government of South.
Thursday March 30 at 9 p.m. on Paris Première. Sang-ho Yeon’s action movie (2016). With Gong Yoo. 1h58.
